Latest news with #highsociety
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Royal fury over fake German prince who has met Prince Charles after using legal loophole to gain access to high society
A fake German prince who has rubbed shoulders with Prince Charles has been slammed for using a legal loophole to gain access to high society. His Serene Highness Dr Donatus, Prince of Hohenzollern, has spent the better part of two decades schmoozing with Britain's elite. But Donatus, who is really a 64-year-old music teacher called Markus Hänsel, was only able to do this after paying to be adopted by a minor German royal in the House of Hohenzollern at the age of 42. The real Prince of Hohenzollern, Karl Friedrich, the head of the House of Hohenzollern, has hit out at Donatus for using his family's name. He told The Sun: 'It makes me angry and frustrated, it leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. 'Donatus is not my blood, he is not a member of the German royal family, he is simply a non-royal name bearer. 'He certainly cannot use the moniker of Serene Highness.' Donatus is connected to several music organisations and charities, alongside King Charles and Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent. He is the Chairman of the Friends of the English Chamber Orchestra and is also ambassador of The Purcell School for Young Musicians, in Bushey, Hertfordshire, both of which are organisations that King Charles is a patron of. Donatus is also a member of the International Board of Governors of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, of which the Duke of Kent is patron, and and Creative Benefactor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. On top of this, he was previously a Principal Supporter of London's Royal College of Music, and a founding patron of the Royal College of Music Prince Consort Orchestra. In one clip taken from his Surrey home, a photo of him and King Charles was seen on the side. Prince Karl told the Sun that he confronted Donatus over his claim to his family's name, and it was revealed that Katharina Feodora, Princess of Hohenzollern, adopted him in around 2003. 'I wrote to Donatus and said I know all the members of my family but I hadn't heard of him. He wrote back and said, 'yes I have been adopted by your aunt Katharina'. 'I then spoke to my aunt and she told me, 'yes well, he offered me such an amount of money I couldn't resist'. She was always short of money. 'There's nothing we as a family can do.' Three years after he was adopted, he married Dr Viola Hallman, heiress of the Theis steel business, who later became Dr Viola Christa, Princess of Hohenzollern. They lived in a castle in Haelen, the Netherlands. Viola died of cancer in 2012. Donatus told The Sun in an emailed statement, written in the third person: 'Donatus has the same legal rank and rights represented in Germany's family law as Karl Friedrich of Hohenzollern, who does not have the authority to speak on behalf of all the members of the family.' He also says he 'financially supports' his 'mother' Katharina. Prince Karl said he is now seeking legal advice on the matter: 'We don't like somebody bringing the family name into a bad light. 'It's obvious he doesn't know me and the history of the Swabian branch of the Hohenzollerns. He's an uninformed man. 'He is not a member of the royal house of Hohenzollern.'
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A New View of John Singer Sargent's American Socialites
A group of beautiful, prominent American women from the Gilded Age are gathering in the same room for the first time this month at Kenwood House, a sprawling estate-turned-museum in London. They're part of a new exhibition in honor of the 100th anniversary of the death of John Singer Sargent, a leading portraitist of his time. The show, 'Heiress: Sargent's American Portraits,' which runs through Oct. 5, features 16 high-society women across eight lavish oil paintings and 10 charcoal drawings dated between 1884 and 1923. Sargent's subjects were part of a wave of wealthy American women who married into upper-class British families, infusing new money in return for status in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. British society was not always welcoming to these women as they tried to get used to drafty old houses and stiff manners. In the United States, they faced resentment for transferring wealth out of the country and into English society. 'They were pilloried on both sides of the Atlantic,' Wendy Monkhouse, the show's curator, said. Because of their status in high society — not to mention their beauty and wealth — American socialites became known in the press as 'dollar princesses,' a tabloid-friendly moniker that persists to this day in histories of the period. But these women — many of whom went on to make permanent marks on British society — were more than voiceless brides or human equivalents of a line of credit. There was a myth that these women 'sold themselves for a title and lived unhappily ever after,' Monkhouse said. She said she wanted to ask if that myth held up. 'Guess what? Of course it doesn't,' she said. She decided against using the phrase 'dollar princess' in the exhibition title, hoping to focus on the women's inner lives and accomplishments rather than just on the splendor visible in Sargent's paintings. 'It goes to the heart of women as commodities,' Monkhouse said. 'We're trying to say: 'Let's just stop objectifying these people.'' Sargent's subjects often had a lot of influence behind the scenes, bringing prominent people into their homes and spending time in powerful business and political circles. Nancy Astor, for example, became the first woman to take a seat in the British Parliament, where she served for more than 25 years. She was born in Virginia in 1879. After an unhappy first marriage in the United States, she was onboard a cruise liner when she met Waldorf Astor, an American-born newspaper magnate and politician who lived in Britain. They married in 1904. Astor is featured twice in the exhibition: once in a large 1908 oil painting, in which she looks girlish, dressed in a silk gown, and later in a 1923 charcoal portrait in which she looks older and more professional in a hat, with a quizzical look on her face. The images track her evolution from wealthy heiress to accomplished politician, Monkhouse said. The show also features a charcoal portrait of Conseulo Vanderbilt, who in 1906 married Charles Spencer-Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, in a union that had been forced upon her by her mother. (The wedding made the front page of The New York Times on Nov. 7, 1895.) Vanderbilt wrote a memoir — 'The Glitter and the Gold,' published in 1932 — becoming one of the only women in her position to take control of her own narrative. 'My eyes, swollen with tears I had wept, required copious sponging before I could face the curious stares that always greet a bride,' she wrote in the memoir of her wedding day. The unhappy marriage ended in divorce. In 1921, Vanderbilt married again, this time to the French aviator Jacques Balsan. The couple moved to Paris, where she established herself among high society and got involved with charity work. 'Her life isn't tragic,' Monkhouse said. 'She has a very successful second act.' Sargent himself knew something about penetrating the upper classes in Europe. Born to American parents in Italy in 1856, he never lived in the United States full-time. Before moving to London in 1886, he spent his early career in Paris, where he painted the artists and writers who were part of the city's elite. The Metropolitan Museum exhibition 'Sargent and Paris,' running through Aug. 3, tells the story of his time there, and features his famous painting 'Madame X,' a portrait of the Parisian socialite and American expatriate Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. The period in which Sargent worked still speaks to the imagination, including in popular culture. The third season of HBO's 'The Gilded Age' which is set in the era, is set to premiere next month, as is the second season of another 19th-century set drama, 'The Buccaneers,' on Apple TV+. 'Impoverished British aristocracy looking to rich young ladies of new money in the U.S.? That's the whole story of 'Downton Abbey,'' said Erica Hirshler, the senior curator of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Boston museum contributed an oil painting of Lady Edith Playfair, wearing a gold and black dress, to the Kenwood House exhibition. Lady Playfair was born into the wealthy Boston-based Russell family, which earned its fortune trading silk, tea and opium with China in the 19th century and buying Boston real estate. Unlike some of her contemporaries, her marriage to a British baron seemed to be a happy one, Hirshler said. Having all these portraits in one place, with information about their subjects' lives, humanizes these women and shows that they were more than just 'dollar princesses,' she said. 'It's really a wonderful opportunity to meet these people as people.'
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The scandalous past of Sydney's most discreet socialite: Today, she's a charity maven married into a mining fortune. You'd never guess why she was suspended from her posh private school...
When we talk about the 'swans of high society', there are few more enigmatic and elusive than Francesca Duncan. The 37-year-old charity maven is married to Campbell Duncan, the son of coal mining magnate and Rich Lister Travers Duncan.
Daily Mail
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Insiders spill what REALLY happened between ex-BFFs Shelley Sullivan and Kristin Fisher at the Silver Party - a year after the eyebrow queen denied being 'the other woman' in the mogul's marriage split
A week has passed since the ritzy Silver Party brought together a Who's Who of high society to raise $3.7million for the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation. While the mood was light and celebratory for the most part, I am reliably informed there was a slight chill in the air for two particular guests.
Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Princess Marianne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn obituary: photographer
Whenever Princess Marianne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn found herself in high society, which was often, she would unclasp her Chanel handbag to retrieve a small camera that she kept hidden there 'like lipstick' and begin to snap. She knew most of her subjects already — she once said that she 'always photographed her friends as friends' — so they were instinctively at ease. The photographs she took, some 300,000 of them, were masterpieces in candid, sometimes even comic, intimacy: Aristotle Onassis attempting to repair his beach car, for instance; or the soprano Maria Callas snorkelling with her poodle on her back. 'You're not a paparazzo,' the Princess of Monaco once said. 'You're a mamarazza.' She photographed her children — in one, her daughter memorably swigs champagne and
